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364: Lowering the Onion into Hell: Strategic Realism vs. Christian Pacifism
About this Episode
In The Brothers Karamazov, the character Grushenka tells a story about an old peasant woman who never did a good deed in her entire life and went to Hell when she died. The woman's guardian angel petitioned God to let him search her life for a single good deed and if he found one, God would let her into Heaven. God agreed. It turns out she had once given a beggar an onion! Her single good deed! So God told the guardian angel to lower the onion into Hell to lift her out of the Lake of Fire...
What happens next depends upon the teller of the tale...
Today we venture into theology and the surprisingly radical nature of Christianity. Dorothy Day once quoted in The Long Loneliness, "no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy." I do my best to untangle what is genuinely striking in reading the Gospels with fresh eyes, and contrast that against much of the market-oriented and security competition games that dominate our world.
So much of where that leads us sounds silly in the cold light of day. It's downright maladaptive to worldly success. But as Léon Bloy once said, "the only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint." So, what the hell are we supposed to make of a world that is so at odds with the gentleness commanded by so many of the world's spiritual traditions?
I'll share with you what I've learned about myself in trying to become simpler, and do so with as open a heart as I can muster.
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
— Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself,", Leaves of Grass
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire
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Resources
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Realism (international relations)
Liberalism (international relations)
338: Carbon Security & the Geopolitics of Carbon Removal—w/ Sarah Godek
Sermon on the Mount on Wikipedia
The Sermon on the Mount starting with Matthew 5, King James Version (for the idioms alone)
The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day
The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy
"The Epistle to the Galatians" on Wikipedia
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X & Alex Haley
A Hidden Life (go watch this film right away!)
345: Why Too Many TV Antiheroes May Be Bad for the Climate
It isn't thematically exactly right since I argue against many of its verses, but the chorus to Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" is apt: "Oh, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now!" I prefer the version by The Byrds.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
The "no one should die from a preventable illness" meme
No transcript available for this episode.
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